The Platypus Review issue #7 October 2008 (9/28/08)

Issue #7 /October 2008 2

Iraq and the election

The fog of "anti-war" politics

Chris Cutrone

BARACK OBAMA had, until recently, made his campaign
for President of the United States a referendum on the
invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the Democratic Party
primaries, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for her vote in
favor of the invasion. Among Republican contenders, John
McCain went out of his way to appear as the candidate
most supportive of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq.
Looking towards the general election, it is over Iraq that
the candidates have been most clearly opposed: Obama
has sought to distinguish himself most sharply from Mc-
Cain on Iraq, emphasizing their differences in judgment.
Prior to the recent financial melt-down on Wall Street,
there was a consistency of emphasis on Iraq as a signal
issue of the campaign. But with Iraq dramatically pacified
in recent months, its political importance has diminished.
Obama's position on Iraq has, if anything, lost him traction
as the McCain-supported Bush policy has succeeded.

Now might be a good time to step back and look at
assumptions regarding the politics of the war, and assess
their true nature and character, what they have meant for
the mainstream as well as for the ostensible "Left."

One major assumption that has persisted from the
beginning of the anti-war movement and over the course
of the two presidential terms of the Bush administration
has been that the Iraq war was the result of a maverick
policy, in which "neoconservative" ideologues hijacked
the U.S. government in order to implement an extreme
agenda. Recently, more astute observers of American
politics such as Adolph Reed |in "Where Obamaism seems
to be going," Black Agenda Report, July 16, 2008, on-line
at blackagendareport.com] have conceded the point that
a war in Iraq could easily have been embraced even by a
Democratic adminstration. Reed writes:

"Lesser evilists assert as indisputable fact that Gore, or
even Kerry, wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Perhaps Gore
wouldn't have, but I can't say that's a sure thing. (And
who was his running mate, by the way? [Joe Lieber-
man, who recently spoke in support of McCain at the
Republican National Convention— CC.]] Moreover, we
don't know what other military adventurism that he

—like Clinton— would have undertaken . . . No, I'm not
at all convinced that the Right wouldn't have been able
to hound either Gore into invading Iraq or Kerry into
continuing the war indefinitely."

This raises the issue of what "opposition" to the Iraq
war policy of the Bush administration really amounts
to. The Democrats' jockeying for position is an excellent
frame through which to examine the politics of the war.

For the Democrats' criticism of the Bush policy has been
transparently opportunist, to seize upon the problems of
the war for political gain against the Republicans. Opposi-
tion has come only to the extent that the war seemed to
be a failed policy, something of which Obama has taken
advantage because he was not in the U.S. Senate when
the war authorization was voted, and so he has been
able to escape culpability for this decision his fellow
Democrats made when it was less opportune to oppose
the war. (Recall that this fact was the occasion for Bill
Clinton's infamous remark that Obama's supposed record
of uncompromised opposition to the war was a "fairy tale,"
for Clinton pointed out that Obama had admitted that he
didn't know how he would have voted had he been in the
Senate at the time.) Furthermore, opposition to the war
on the supposed "Left" has similarly focused on the Bush
administration (for example in the very name of the anti-
war coalition World Can't Wait, i.e., until the next election,
and their call to "Exorcise the Bush Regime"], thus playing
directly into the politics of the Democratic Party, result-
ing now in either passive or active support of the Obama
candidacy.

On Obama's candidacy, Reed went on to say that

"Obama is on record as being prepared to expand the
war ("on terror"] into Pakistan and maybe Iran . . . He's
also made pretty clear that AIPAC [American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee] has his ear, which does
it for the Middle East, and I wouldn't be shocked if
his administration were to continue, or even step up,
underwriting covert operations against Venezuela,
Cuba [he's already several times linked each of those
two governments with North Korea and Iran] and
maybe Ecuador or Bolivia. . . . This is where I don't give
two shits for the liberals' criticism of Bush's foreign
policy: they don't mind imperialism; they just want a
more efficiently and rationally managed one. As Paul
Street argues in Black Agenda Report, as well as in
his forthcoming book Barack Obama and the Future of
American Politics, an Obama presidency would further
legitimize the imperialist orientation of US foreign
policy by inscribing it as liberalism or the 'new kind' of
progressivism. . . . [T]he bipartisan 'support the troops'
rhetoric that has become a scaffold for discussing
the war is a ruse for not addressing its foundation in
a bellicose, imperialist foreign policy that makes the
United States a scourge on the Earth. Obama, like
other Dems, doesn't want such a discussion any more
than the Republicans do because they're all committed
to maintaining that foundation."

In recognizing that the "liberals' criticism of Bush's
foreign policy [doesn't] mind imperialism; they just want a
more efficiently and rationally managed one," Reed and oth-
ers' arguments on the "Left" beg the question of U.S. "im-
perialism" and its place in the world. This is an unexamined
inheritance from the Vietnam anti-war movement of the
1 960s-70s that has become doxa on the "Left." Put another
way, it has been long since anyone questioned the meaning
of "anti-imperialism"— asked, "as opposed to whatl"
If, as Reed put it about Gore, Kerry, et al., that the

"Right would have been able to hound" them into Iraq or
other wars, this begs the question of why those on the

"Left" would not regard Obama, Kerry, Gore, or (either]
Clinton, not as beholden to the Right, but rather being
themselves part of the Right, not "capitulating to" U.S.
imperialism but part of its actual political foundation.
There is an evident wish to avoid raising the question and
problem of what is the actual nature and character of "U.S.
imperialism" and its policies, what actually makes the
U.S., as Reed put it, "a scourge on the Earth," and what it
means to oppose this from the "Left." For it might indeed
be the case that not only the Democrats don't want such a
discussion of the "foundation" of "U.S. imperialism" ("any
more than the Republicans do"], but neither do those on
the "Left."

For Adolph Reed, as for any ostensible "Left," the
difficulty lies in the potential stakes of problematizing the
role of U.S. power in the world. If the U.S. has proven to
be, as Reed put it, a "scourge on the Earth," the "Left" has
consistently shied away from thinking about, or remained
deeply confused and self-contradictory over the reasons
for this— and what can and should be done about it.

Reed placed this problem in historical context by
pointing out that:

"[E]very major party presidential candidate between
1956 and 1972— except one, Barry Goldwater, who ran
partly on his willingness to blow up the world and was
trounced for it— ran on a pledge to end the Vietnam
War. Every one of them lied, except maybe Nixon the
third time he made the pledge, but that time he had a
lot of help from the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong."

— But Nixon et al. would have gotten a lot more "help"
living up to their pledges to end the U.S. war in Vietnam if
the Communists had just laid down and died.

Was this the politics of the "big lie," as Reed insists,
echoing the criticisms of the Bush administration's war
policy, supposedly based on deceit, or is there a more
simple and obvious explanation: that indeed, all American
politicians were and remain committed to ending war, but
only on their own, "U.S. imperial" terms? And why would
anyone expect otherwise?

If this is the case, then, the difference between the
Obama and McCain campaigns regarding U.S. "imperial-
ism" would amount to no difference at all. Obama has
pledged to remove U.S. troops from Iraq as quickly as
possible, but only if the "security situation" allows this.
McCain has pledged to remain in Iraq as long as it takes to

"get the job done." What's the difference? Especially given
that the Bush administration itself has begun troop reduc-
tions and has agreed in its negotiations with the govern-

ment of Iraq to a "definite timetable" for withdrawal of U.S.
combat troops, as the Sunni insurgency has been quelled
or co-opted into the political process and Shia militias
like Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Brigade have not only laid
down their arms but are presently disbanding entirely. No
less than Bush and McCain, Obama, too, is getting what
he wants in Iraq. Everyone can declare "victory." And they
are doing so. (Obama can claim vindication the degree
to which the pacification of Iraq seems more due to the
political process there— such as the "Anbar awakening"
movement, etc.— than to U.S. military intervention.)

All the doomsday scenarios are blowing away like
so many mirages in the sand, revealing that the only
differences that ever existed among Republicans and
Democrats amounted to posturing over matters of detail
in policy implementation and not over fundamental
"principles." This despite the Obama campaign's sophistic
qualifiers on the evident victory of U.S. policy in Iraq being
merely a "tactical success within a strategic blunder,"
and their pointing out that the greater goals of effective
"political reconciliation" among Iraqi factions remain yet
to be achieved. What was once regarded in the cynically
hyperbolic "anti-war" rhetoric of the Democrats as an un-
mitigated "disaster" in Iraq is turning out to be something
that merely could have been done better.

The "Left" has echoed the hollowness of such rhetoric.
At base, this has been the result of a severely mistaken if not
entirely delusional imagination of the war and its causes.

At base, the U.S. did not invade and occupy Iraq to
steal its oil, or for any other venal or nefarious reason, but
rather because the U.N.'s 12-year-old sanctions against
Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, which meant the
compromise and undermining of effective Iraqi sover-
eignty (for instance in the carving of an autonomous Kurd-
ish zone under U.N. and NATO military protection] was
unraveling in the oil-for-food scandal etc., and Saddam,
after the first grave mistake of invading Kuwait, made the
further fateful errors of spiting the U.N. arms inspectors
and counting on being able to balance the interests of the
European and other powers in the U.N. against the U.S.
threat of invasion and occupation. The errors of judgment
and bad-faith opportunism of Saddam, the Europeans, and
others were as much the cause for the war as any policy
ambitions of the neocons in the Bush administration. Iraq
was becoming a "failed state," and not least because of
the actions of its indisputably horrifically oppressive rul-
ers. If Saddam could not help but to choose among such
bad alternatives for Iraq, this stands as indictment of
the Baathist regime, its unviable character in a changing
world. The niche carved out by the combination of Cold
War geopolitics and the international exploitation of the
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s for the Baathist shop of horrors
was finally, mercifully, closing.

The unraveling of the U.N. sanctions regime prior to
the 2003 invasion and occupation, enforced not only by the
U.S. and Britain but by neighboring states and others, can-
not be separated from the history of the disintegration of
the Iraqi state. The armchair quarterbacking of "anti-war"
politics was from the outset (and remains to this day] tac-
itly, shame-facedly, in favor of the status quo (and worse,
today, must retrospectively try to distort and apologize for

"Iraq" continues on page 3

A polemic on protest Violence at the RNC

Reflections on the RNC resistance

Raechel Tiffe

Ian Morrison and Benjamin Blumberg

I DECIDED NOT TO PARTICIPATE in any illegal protests
at the RNC.

There's a simple, material reason: Had I been ar-
rested I would have been accountable for bail money [or
unhappily relying on legal defense funds that I truly feel
have more value elsewhere] and possibly a day's worth of
income. I have been and continue to be a member of the
working class. I grew up with a single mother who worked
two low-paying jobs, and for the past five years, living on
my own, I have survived well below the poverty line. I am
also currently uninsured and without health care. Cultur-
ally speaking, the working class community might not see
me so equitably; I am, after all, college educated and on
my path towards the ivory tower. But still, getting arrested
was not financially feasible for me. I have rent to pay.

The other reason is a little more complicated. I was
afraid that I wouldn't agree with the whole agenda. I
was proved right. I support: blockading the GOP buses,
blocking intersections, radical dance parties in public
space. I don't support: smashing windows/cars, violent
hate rhetoric ("What do we want? Bush Dead!"), and, most
importantly, making abstractions out of human beings.

It is not surprising or necessarily regrettable that not
everyone has the same version of anarchism. And so I am
not angry that there are those who choose to interpret and
perform it differently, but I am angry when that perfor-
mance goes so blatantly against some of the fundamental
elements of this "new world in our hearts" that so many
radical/anarchist/progressives claim to want. And I am
angry when— even if people aren't moral pacifists— that
a "movement" that claims to want the revolution can't
even see the relevance in strategic pacifism. To use the
most obvious and simple example: the protesters during
the Civil Rights movement did not fight back, the media
captured it all, and they gained the vast majority of sup-
port from our nation. I'm not trying to say that the fight
against capitalism is the same as the fight against racist
legislation, but I am certainly not above borrowing tactics
that actually worked.

True, I was a Peace Studies minor and am chock full
of stories of peaceful victories. But I am no longer a blind
pacifist. Given tangible goals, sometimes destruction
makes sense. The Autonomen, the original Black Bloc,
protected their squats through aggressive confrontation.
This is a real, concrete goal. Fighting to end 'Republican'
ideology is not. Breaking a Department store window will
not end American conservativism.

The violence at the RNC seems to me completely
goal-less. Worse, it stands in opposition to the solidarity
we claim to embody. Macy's windows and those smashed
up cop cars are going to be fixed by working class men
and women, probably pissed that they have to spend extra
time replacing what was in perfectly good condition a

day ago. Similarly, when anarchist groups participate in
illegal action at Immigrant's Rights marches, they do so
with complete disregard for their "comrades" who would
be deported were they to be nearby someone who was
instigating the police. How's that for solidarity?

When polarization occurs within the "movement" itself,
we become weaker, more divided and further and further
away from the revolution. I don't think the solution is uto-
pia-group-think. Cultural identity can motivate individu-
als towards greater and greater participation. But there
needs to be an idea big enough for everyone to agree
on, an idea that takes precedence over the fun of diverse
tactics.

Imagine for a moment that the RNC Welcoming Com-
mittee decided to declare a complete commitment to non-
violence. More Americans will participate in nonviolent
actions that have less potential for getting them arrested
than violent action that will, imagine that instead of figur-
ing out how to hide hammers in their pants, the RNC Wel-
coming Committee went out and organized every single
group that attended the mainstream march. Imagine now
that those 50,000 people sitting in the intersection, block-
ing the GOP buses. The cops wouldn't know what to do
with themselves. The world would watch, and the radical
left would gain sympathy and support.

A comrade noted that she thought we were supposed
to be protesting the violence and hate perpetrated by the
Bush/McCain regime, not re-enacting it. How can we, as
revolutionaries dedicated to a just and peaceful world, cre-
ate that through violence and hate? I believe in the power
of temporary autonomous zones present in the spirit of po-
litical action in the streets, the creation of our new world in
the ephemeral but blissful moments of united rebellion...
but my new world has no smashed glass. My new world
has no fear of attack. My new world has dance parties and
kisses and laughter and music and vegan food and chants
that make you feel so warm n' fuzzy that you become
physically incapable of causing harm to another!

My new world is not "us" taking over "them." When
the oppressed seek to overcome opression by becoming
themselves oppressors, absolutely no one wins. When
one attacks another human being who seems inhumanle],
the attacker too becomes inhumanle] in that act. It is
impossible to be fully present and human[e] in violence.
As Paulo Friere wrote: "How can the oppressed, as divided
unauthentic beings, participate in the pedagogy of their
liberation? As long as they live in the duality in which to be
is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this
contribution is impossible.... Liberation is thus a childbirth,
and a painful one." A childbirth, he writes, because it will
be new and unlike anything we've seen before. We've seen
violence before, we've seen things smashed and people
hurt. But we haven't yet seen our liberation.... IP

IN MARCH 2003, millions took to the streets worldwide
to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Despite their
numbers, the efforts proved in vain. The war went on; the
protests dwindled. But however attenuated, there are still
protests. In Minneapolis/St. Paul this August, some 10,000
marched against the Republican National Convention. But
as organized rallies gave way to irrational violence, the
inadequacy of five years of failed Anti-War activism and
Left opposition came into sharp relief.

Most of the confrontations amounted to simple, mo-
mentary blockages of traffic. By all accounts, the police
grossly overreacted: harassing journalists, brutalizing
protestors, arresting the innocent. But more fringe
elements in activist culture were also on display. Some
hurled bricks through the window of a bus transport-
ing delegates; others sprayed delegates with unknown
irritants. These actions may seem excessive and irrational,
beyond the objectives and attitudes of the wider move-
ment. But their deeper motivations lies within the main-
stream of activist culture today

The helplessness of the anti-war movement has
turned the Left's disappointments and frustrations into
pathology. Energy is directed, not towards revolutionary
change, but against social integration. For college-aged
youth this means the transition from parental authority
to working life. The anxiety and fear built up around this
process of socialization creates a political imagination di-
rected at forming ruptures and breaking points in society
— everything, from organizational meetings to attending
protests, centers on creating a wall of resistance against
one's own inevitable absorption into society.

As seasoned anti-war activist Alexander Cockburn
pointed out last year, "an anti-war rally has to be edgy, not

comfortable. Emotions should be high, nerves at least a
bit raw, anger tinged with fear." ("Whatever Happened to
the Anti-War Movement?" New Left Review, July-August
2007). Such emotionalism points to the way present forms
of helplessness have been naturalized into one of the anti-
war movement's core assumptions, turning trepidation
into a political program.

Naturalizing helplessness, today's protesters celebrate
simple altercations with the police as victories. Violence
seems to cleanse the individual of their 'bourgeois' confor-
mity. Attending a protest means breaking with the deca-
dence of consumer society, creating a 'prefigurative' space,
trying to 'create the new world in the palm of the old.' Each
blow of the truncheon dramatizes the difference between
protestor and police. The rougher the conflict, the more
the protestor feels free from the burden of society.

Yet, young protesters only elicit a police beating in
order to sensationalize their own submission to authority.
And, ironically, this is coupled with a clear awareness that
the tactics employed are utterly inadequate in addressing
the issues these protests propose to be fighting. In the
age of Predator drones, blocking a highway will not stop
American military might.

The Left's helplessness, on full display in Minneapolis,
has eroded the very function of protest. Once, protest dem-
onstrated the vitality and relevancy of the demand for so-
cial transformation. Thousands in the streets could not be
ignored. But protest has devolved into an insular subcul-
ture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a
pathological attitude towards social integration. Activists
who equate social domination with their experience with
tear gas, tazers and rubber bullets block the development
of a more serious and effective Leftist politics. IP

The Platypus Affiliated Society presents:

What is a Movement?

A discussion on the meaning and direction of "Movements" historically and today.

Thursday, October 16, 2008,
7-9 PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago
280 S. Columbus Dr. main auditorium

Panelists:

Luis Brennan (new Students for a Democratic Society]
Chuck Hendricks [Unite Here]
Jorge Mujica [Movimiento 10 de Marzo]
Pomegranate Health Collective Representative
Richard Rubin (Platypus]

The Platypus Review

Taking stock of the multifaceted universe of positions and
goals that constitute Left politics today, we are left with
the disquieting suspicion that perhaps a deeper common-
ality underlies this apparent variety: what exists today is
built on the desiccated remains of what was once felt to
be possible.

In order to make sense of the present, we find it neces-
sary to disentangle the vast accumulation of positions on
the Left, and to evaluate their saliency for an emancipa-
tory politics of the present. Doing this work implies a
reconsideration of what we mean by "the Left".

This task necessarily begins from what we see as a
prevalent feature of the Left today: a general disenchant-
ment with the present state of progressive politics. We
feel that this disenchantment cannot be cast off by sheer
will, by "carrying on the fight," but must be addressed and
itself made an object of critique. Thus we begin with what
immediately confronts us.

The editorial board of The Platypus Review is motivat-
ed by a sense that the very concepts of the "political" and

Submission guidelines

Articles can range in length from 500-1 ,000 words. We will
consider longer pieces but prefer that they be submitted
as proposals.

Please send articles, event calendar listing submissions, and
any inquiries about this project to:
platypus 1 9 1 7webzinetdyahoogroups. com

the "Left" have become so inclusive as to be meaning-
less. The Review seeks to be a forum among a variety of
tendencies and approaches to these categories of thought
and action— not out of a concern with inclusion for its own
sake, but rather to provoke productive disagreement and
to open shared goals as sites of contestation. In this way,
the recriminations and accusations arising from politi-
cal disputes of the past might be elevated to an ongoing
critique that seeks to clarify its object.

The editorial board wishes to provide an ongoing public
forum wherein questioning and reconsidering one's own
convictions is not seen as a weakness, but as part of the
necessary work of building a revolutionary politics. We hope
to create and sustain a space for interrogating and clarifying
the variety of positions and orientations currently represent-
ed on the political Left, in which questions may be raised
and discussions pursued that do not find a place within
existing Left discourses, locally or Internationally. As long as
submissions exhibit a genuine commitment to this project,
all kinds of content will be considered for publication.

The

Platypus Review

Issue #7 I October 2008

1 Finance capital:

Why financial capitalism is no more
"fictitious" than any other kind

Platypus Historians Group

1 Five questions to the student Left

Pame(a Noga(es and Ben Shepard

2 Iraq and the election
The fog of "anti-war" politics

Chris Cutrone

2 A polemic on protest

Reflections on the RNC resistance

Raeche] Tiffe

Staff

Senior Editor:
Ian Morrison

Editors:
Greg Gabrellas
Pamela Nogales
Laurie Rojas
Benjamin Shepard

Designer:
Pamela Nogales

Copy Editors:
Michael Yong
Jeremy Cohan

Webzine Editor:
Laurie Rojas

The Platypus Review is funded by:

The University of Chicago Student Government
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Student Government
The Platypus Affiliated Society

2 Violence at the RNC

Benjamin Blumberg and Ian Morrison

3 Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy
of history of the Left

Chris Cutrone

4- Reenacting '68

Liam Warfield

www.platypusl 91 7. org /theplatypusreview

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3 The Platypus Review

Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

Chris Cutrone

[The following is a talk that was given at the Marxist-Hu-
manist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marx-
ist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in
Chicago on Friday, July 25, 2008.]

I WANT TO SPEAK ABOUT the meaning of history for any
purportedly Marxian Left.

We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because
we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in
fact one's theory of the present. Implicitly or explicitly, in
one's conception of the history of the Left, is an account
of how the present came to be. By focusing on the history
of the Left, or, by adopting a Left-centric view of history,
we hypothesize that the most important determinations
of the present are the result of what the Left has done or
failed to do historically.

For the purposes of this talk, I will focus on the broad-
est possible framing for such questions and problems
of capital in history, the broadest possible context within
which I think one needs to understand the problems faced
by the Left, specifically by a purportedly Marxian Left.

I will not, for example, be focusing so much on issues
for Platypus in the history of the various phases and
stages of capital itself, for instance our contention that the
1960s represented not any kind of advance, but a profound
retrogression on the Left. I will not elucidate our account
of how the present suffers from at least 3 generations of
degeneration and regression on the Left: the first, in the
1930s, being tragic; the second in the 1960s being farcical;
and the most recent, in the 1990s, being sterilizing.

But, suffice it to say, I will point out that, for Platypus,
the recognition of regression and the attempt to under-
stand its significance and causes is perhaps our most
important point of departure. The topic of this talk is the
most fundamental assumption informing our understand-
ing of regression.

For purposes of brevity, I will not be citing explicitly,
but I wish to indicate my indebtedness for the following
treatment of a potential Marxian philosophy of history,
beyond Marx and Engels themselves, and Rosa Luxem-
burg, Lenin and Trotsky, to Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch,
Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and, last but not least,
the Marx scholar Moishe Postone. And, moreover, I will be
in dialogue, through these writers, with Hegel, who distin-
guished philosophical history as the story of the develop-
ment of freedom.— For Hegel, history is only meaningful
the degree to which it is the story of freedom.

Capital is completely unprecedented in the history of

, continued from page 2

CHANGE

the history of Baathism). In comparison with such evasion
of responsibility, the Bush administration's invasion and
occupation of Iraq was an eminently responsible act. They
were willing to stake themselves in a way the Democrats
and the Europeans and others were not— and the "Left"
could not. The "success" of the Bush policy amounts to its
ability to cast all alternatives into more or less impotent
posturing. Attributing motives for the war to American
profiteering is to mistake effect for cause. Complaining
about the fact that American companies have profited
from the war is to impotently protest against the world as
it is, for someone was going to profit from it— would it be
better if French, Japanese or Saudi firms did so?

That the U.S. government under Bush broke deco-
rum and made the gesture of invading Iraq "unilaterally"
without U.N. Security Council approval says nothing to
the fact that Iraq was likely to be invaded and occupied I by
"armed inspection teams" supported by tens of thousands
of "international" troops, etc.] in any case. Did it really
matter whether the U.S. had the U.N. fig leaf covering the
ugliness of its military instrument? It was only a matter of
when and how it was going to be put to use, in managing
the international problem the Iraqi state had become. No
one among the international powers-that-be, including
the most "rogue" elements of the global order (Russia,
China, Iran, et al.] had any firm interest in restoring to
Saddam's Baathists the status guo from before 1990 and,
needless to say, not only the U.S. and Britain, but also

humanity, hence, any struggle for emancipation beyond
capital is also completely unprecedented. While there is
a connection between the unprecedented nature of the
emergence of capital in history and the struggle to get
beyond it, this connection can also be highly misleading,
leading to a false symmetry between the transition into
and within different periods of the transformations of mod-
ern capital, and a potential transition beyond capital. The
revolt of the Third Estate, which initiated a still on-going
and never-to-be-exhausted modern history of bourgeois-
democratic revolutions, is both the ground for, and, from
a Marxian perspective, the now potentially historically
obsolescent social form of politics from which proletarian
socialist politics seeks to depart, to get beyond.

Hegel, as a philosopher of the time of the last of the
great bourgeois-democratic revolutions marking the
emergence of modern capital, the Great French Revolu-
tion of 1 789, was for this reason a theorist of the revolt of
the Third Estate. Marx, who came later, after the begin-
ning of the Industrial Revolution of the 1 9th Century, faced
problems Hegel did not.

It has often been stated, but not fully comprehended by
Marxists that Marx recognized the historical mission of the
class-conscious proletariat, to overcome capitalism and to
thus do away with class society. Traditionally, this meant,
however paradoxically, either the end of the pre-history or
the beginning of the true history of humanity. — In a sense,
this duality of the possibility of an end and a true beginning,
was a response to a Right Hegelian notion of an end to
history, what is assumed by apologists for capital as a
best of all possible worlds.

Famously, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
stated that all history hitherto has been the history of
class struggles; Engels added a clever footnote later that
specified "all written history." We might extrapolate from
this that what Engels meant was the history of civiliza-
tion; history as class struggle did not pertain, for instance,
to human history or social life prior to the formation of
classes, the time of the supposed "primitive communism."
Later, in 1942 (in "Reflections on Class Theory"], Adorno,
following Benjamin (in the "Theses on the Philosophy of
History," 1940], wrote that such a conception by Marx and
Engels of all of history as the history of class struggles was
in fact a critique of all of history, a critique of history itself.

So in what way does the critique of history matter
in the critique of capital? The problem with the com-
monplace view of capitalism as primarily a problem of
exploitation is that it is in this dimension that capital fails

Saudi Arabia and Iran, and most especially the Iraqi Kurds
and Shia, were not about to let that happen. Saddam was
on the way out. It was only a matter of how.

All the rhetoric about the "overreach" and "hubris" of
U.S. policy in Iraq says nothing to the fact that a cross-
roads there was being reached— this was already true un-
der Clinton. All the bombast about the "illegal"— or even

"criminal"— character of the U.S. invasion and occupation
of Iraq neglects the simple fact that the U.S. occupation
was authorized by the U.N. When Democrats impugn
the "crusading" motives of the Bush administration with
sophistry about the supposed folly of trying to spread

"democracy" in Iraq and the greater Middle East, is this a

"progressive" argument, or a conservative one?

Not only the Democrats' but the "Left's" opposition
to the Iraq war has in fact been from the Right. This is
revealed most perversely by the history of the Iraq policy
recommendations of Joe Biden, who has been touted by
the Obama campaign as bringing "foreign policy creden-
tials" to their ticket as candidate for Vice President. Biden
once advocated a break-up of Iraq into separate Shia,
Sunni and Kurdish states, during the height of the Sunni
insurgency, which would have punished the Sunni by
leaving them without access to Iraq's oil wealth (which is
concentrated in the Kurdish and Shiite areas of Kirkuk and
Basra). Would pursuit of such an ethno-sectarian division
of Iraq have been a "progressive" outcome for further-
ing the "democratic self-determination" of the peoples
of Iraq?— In comparison with the 20% troop "surge" that
has in fact, as even Obama has put it, "succeeded beyond
our wildest dreams." Or might we see in such apparently

"extreme" policy alternatives as Biden's a deeper underly-
ing fact, that from the standpoint of not only U.S. "imperial"
interests but those of the global order, it doesn't make
much difference if Iraq remains a single or is broken up
into multiple states, whether it is ruled by secular or theo-
cratic regimes, or whether its government is "democratic"
or dictatorial, whether its civil society is "liberal" or not.
But, presumably, this matters a great deal to the Iraqis!

None of the posed alternatives regarding Iraq— not
before, during or since the invasion and occupation— can
be ascribed to being inherently in service of or opposed
to the on-going realities of U.S. power ("imperialism"], or
the interests of global capitalism, because all of them are
compatible with these. Rather, the policy alternatives are
all matters of opportunistic orientation to an underlying
reality that is not being substantially challenged or even
recognized politically by any of the actors involved, great
or small, on the "Right" or "Left," from al-Qaeda to the
neoconservatives, or "libertarians" like Ron Paul, from
Bush to the President of the Iranian Islamic Republic
Ahmadinejad, and Republicans and Democrats from Mc-
Cain to Obama, or "independents" and the Green Party's
candidates Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader, to the far-

"Left" of "anarchists" and other antinomians like writers for
Counterpunch and the Chomskyans, et al. at Z magazine, or
the "anti-war" protest coalitions led by "Marxist" groups

to distinguish itself from other forms of civilization. What
is new in capital is social domination, which must be dis-
tinguished both logically and historically, structurally and
empirically, from exploitation, to which it is not reducible.
Social domination means the domination of society by
capital. This is what is new about capital in the history of
civilization; prior forms of civilization knew overt domina-
tion of some social groups over others, but did not know
as Marx recognized in capital a social dynamic to which
all social groups— all aspects of society as a whole— are
subject.

So we must first draw a demarcation approximately
10,000 years ago, with the origins of civilization and class
society, when the great agricultural revolution of the Neo-
lithic Age took place, and human beings went from being
nomadic hunter-gatherers to becoming settled agricul-
turalists. The predominant mode of life for humanity went
from the hunter-gatherer to the peasant, and was this for
most of subsequent history.

Several hundred years ago, however, a similarly profound
transformation began, in which the predominant mode of life
has gone from agricultural peasant to urban worker: wage-
earner, manufacturer, and industrial producer.

More proximally, with the Industrial Revolution in the
late- 18th to early- 1 9th Centuries, certain aspects of this
"bourgeois" epoch of civilization and society manifested
themselves and threw this history of the emergence of
modernity into a new light. Rather than an "end of history"
as bourgeois thinkers up to that time had thought, modern
social life entered into a severe crisis that fundamentally
problematized the transition from peasant- to worker-
based society.

With Marx in the 19th Century came the realization
that bourgeois society, along with all its categories of
subjectivity including its valorization of labor, might itself
be transitional, that the end-goal of humanity might not
be found in the productive individual of bourgeois theory
and practice, but that this society might point beyond itself,
towards a potential qualitative transformation at least
as profound as that which separated the peasant way of
life from the urban "proletarian" one, indeed a transition
more on the order of profundity of the Neolithic Revolution
in agriculture that ended hunter-gatherer society 10,000
years ago, more profound than that which separated mod-
ern from traditional society.

At the same time that this modern, bourgeois society
ratcheted into high gear by the late-1 8th Century, it
entered into crisis, and a new, unprecedented historical

such as the International Socialist Organization (United for
Peace and Justice coalition, Campus Anti-war Network],
Workers World Party (ANSWER coalition], or the Revolu-
tionary Communist Party (World Can't Wait coalition).

All of the supposed "anti-imperialists"— from Iraq poli-
cy dissident Republicans like Senator Chuck Hagel, to the
most intransigent "Marxists" like the Spartacist League-
have failed to be truly anti-"imperialist" in their approach
to Iraq, nor could they be, for none could have possibly
challenged the fundamental conditions of U.S. power in
global capital. There is no politics of anti-imperialism, for
no one asks politically whether and what it means to say
that the U.S. could be more or less "imperialist," whether
the world order can do without the U.S. acting as global
cop— asking, who, for instance, would play this neverthe-
less necessary role in the absence of the U.S.? For there
is no one. And no purported "Left" should want "openings"
for their own sake in the global order— as if any "cracks"
in the "system" won't be the holes into which the world's
most abject will be immediately swallowed, without in any
way sparing the next batch of victims in the train-wreck of
history.

The fundamental inability of anyone on the "Left" to
take a meaningfully alternative position on Iraq, beyond
hoping (vainly) for the "defeat" of or "resistance" to U.S.
policy, and thus immediately joining the opportunism of
the politics of the Democrats, dissident Republicans, and
European and other statesmen, should serve as a warning
about the dire political state of the world and its possibili-
ties today. Accusations might fly about who may more or
less tacitly "support" "U.S. imperialism," but there is such
a thing as protesting too much, especially when it must
be admitted that nothing can be done right now to alter the
given global political and social realities in a progressive-
emancipatory manner. If, as Adolph Reed put it, the U.S.
remains a "scourge on the Earth," is the alternative only
to impotently denounce this and not try to properly under-
stand it— and understand what it would mean to prepare to
begin to meaningfully challenge and overcome this?

As appalling as it might be to recognize, McCain in
his Republican National Convention speech was actually
more truthful and straightforward than Obama when he
pointed out that he has stood consistently behind what has
proved to be a successful policy in Iraq. Obama now must
dissemble on the issue.

On the other hand, the essence of Obama's candidacy
can be seen in the figure of Samantha Power, who was
sacked from his primary campaign after saying, correctly,
that Hillary Clinton was a "monster" who would "say any-
thing" to get elected. Power is a liberal promoter of "hu-
man rights" military interventionism, and began working
as a senior advisor for Obama immediately after he was
elected to the U.S. Senate. Power is a representative of
Obama's version of the historical precedent of JFK's team
of "the best and the brightest" such as Robert McNamara.
In fact, Obama's candidacy has been in its origins much
more about "foreign" than "domestic" policy, and more

phenomenon was manifested in political life, the "Left."
—While earlier forms of politics certainly disputed values,
this was not in terms of historical "progress," which
became the hallmark of the Left.

The Industrial Revolution of the early 19th Century, the
introduction of machine production, was accompanied
by the optimistic and exhilarating socialist Utopias sug-
gested by these new developments, pointing to fantastical
possibilities expressed in the imaginations of Fourier and
Saint-Simon, among others.

Marx regarded the society of "bourgeois right" and
"private property" as indeed already resting on the social
constitution and mediation of labor, from which private
property was derived, and asked the question of whether
the trajectory of this society, from the revolt of the Third
Estate and the manufacturing era in the 18th Century to
the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, indicated the
possibility of a further development.

In the midst of the dramatic social transformations of
the 19th Century in which as Marx put it in the Manifesto
that "all that was solid melted into air," as early as 1843,
Marx prognosed and faced the future virtual proletarian-
ization of society, and asked whether and how humanity in
proletarian form might liberate itself from this condition,
whether and how, and with what necessity the prole-
tariat would "transcend" and "abolish itself." As early as
the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx recognized that socialism
(of Proudhon et al.) was itself symptomatic of capital:
proletarian labor was constitutive of capital, and thus its
politics was symptomatic of how the society conditioned
by capital might reveal itself as transitional, as pointing
beyond itself.— This was Marx's most fundamental point of
departure, that proletarianization was a substantial social
problem and not merely relative to the bourgeoisie, and
that the proletarianization of society was not the overcom-
ing of capital but its fullest realization, and that this— the
proletarianized society of capital— pointed beyond itself.

Thus, with Marx, a philosophy of the history of the Left
was born. For Marx was not a socialist or communist so
muchasa thinker who tasked himself with understanding
the meaning of the emergence of proletarian socialism in
history. Marx was not simply the best or most consistent
or radical socialist, but rather the most historically, and
hence critically, self-aware. By "scientific" socialism, Marx
understood himself to be elaborating a form of knowledge
aware of its own conditions of possibility.

For a Hegelian and Marxian clarification of the speci-

"History" continues on page 4

than will be apparent now that Iraq has been neutralized
as the main issue in the election. Obama, no less than Mc-
Cain, is campaigning for the office not only of the "top cop"
of the U.S., but of the world. Obama's campaign is over
effective policy for this role, not the role itself.

The "Left" is now up in arms in the face of Obama's
candidacy because his campaign explicitly aims to refur-
bish the U.S. government's capacity to play this role, and
perhaps even in expanded ways, as U.S. power would be
equipped to advance the liberal cause of "human rights"
internationally more idealistically and less cynically than
under Bush or Clinton.

But this raises the issue of how to understand the
U.S.'s role in the world. Only at its peril does the Left
treat the explicit Wilsonian doctrine that has essentially
underwritten U.S. policy and power after the First World
War as hypocritical or cynical, for the project of the U.S.
as the central, without-peer hegemonic power of global
capital is one in which all states internationally participate
(through the U.N., the international treaty organization of
U.S. power), only to a greater or lesser extent. Maintaining
the "peaceful" conditions of capital has and will continue
to prove a bloody business at global scale. As much as
one might wish otherwise or simply regret the onus of U.S.
power, reality must be faced.

The hyperbole around Iraq in mainstream politics is
best illustrated by that favored word, "quagmire." But
behind this has been hysteria, not reason. Feeling in one's
step the pull of some gum on the pavement is not the
threat of sinking into quicksand! The Iraqi "insurgents"
knew better than their apologists and cynical anti-Bush
well-wishers among the Democrats and European and
other powers— and their open cheerleaders on the "Left"
—that they were not so intransigent, not so willing to die to
a last man in their "opposition" to the U.S. and its policies,
but only wished to drive a harder bargain at the negotiat-
ing table with the U.S. and its allies in Iraq— and now they
are themselves becoming allies of the Iraqi government
and the U.S.

Currently, it might still remain unclear whether the
combined actions and apparent attenuation of the Iraqi
insurgents/militias and the struggle among the ruling and
oppositional parties of the Iraqi government and, behind
them, their foreign backers in Saudi Arabia and Iran,
and the apparent disarray of the regime of the Iranian
Islamic Republic in its nuclear standoff with the U.S. and
European powers, amount to a temporary situation borne
of a shared wish to ride the Obama train (or merely the
potential for change inherent in the election cycle) into a
better bargaining position regarding U.S. policy and so not
to spoil the U.S. election and bring the supposedly more
bellicose John McCain to power through the fear of the
American public, or whether they've given up the bloody
game of jockeying for influence in Iraq because they've
already spent what chips they had in the last 5 years.

In any case, as far as the election is concerned, Obama

"Iraq" continues on page 4

Issue #7/ October 2008 4

Reenacting 68

Liam Warfield

Finance, continued from page 1

sector]. Polanyi, for instance, complained that capitalism
commodified three things that supposedly cannot be com-
modities, labor, land and money itself. In such a one-sided
opposition to capital, Polanyi neglected to realize that
what makes modern society what it is, what distinguishes
modern capitalism from earlier pre-modern forms of
capital, is that it precisely entails subjecting these suppos-
edly not "commodifiable" things to the commodity form.
Modern capital is precisely about the radical revolution-
izing of how we relate to forms of social intercourse, labor,
and nature.

So no one should be fooled into thinking that suppos-
edly better forms of politically managing (e.g., under the
Democrats) the social investment in, and thus preserving
the "value" and promoting the improvement of mate-
rial production, infrastructure, or forms of knowledge
represents any kind of sure "progress."— No one should
mistake for even a moment that such efforts will not be a
windfall and lining the pockets of the capitalists (on "Main
Street") through upward income-redistribution schemes
any less than "bailing out" Wall Street will be.

The presently bemoaned deregulation of financial
institutions that occurred under Bill Clinton in the 1990s
was not meant (merely) to enrich the rich further, but to
open the way for new forms of economic and social rela-
tions, both locally and globally. Such "neo-liberal" reforms
were meant to overcome, in Milton Friedman's phrase, the
"tyranny of the status quo"— a sentiment any emancipatory
Left ought not to regard with excessive cynicism. For the
neo-liberals found a hearing not only among the wealthy,
but also among many left out of the prior Keynesian/Ford-
ist arrangements— see, for instance, the 2006 Nobel
Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus's social activist
work in "microfinance" in Bangladesh.

A Marxian approach to the problem of capital, as
Lukacs warned with his concept of "reification," recog-
nizes that "labor" and its forms of "production" are no
less "reified" and "ideological" in their practices under
capital, no less "unreal" and subject to de-realization, with
destructive social consequences, than are the forms of
"exchange," monetization and finance.

An authentically Marxian Left should take no side
in the present debates over the merits and pitfalls of
the "bailout" of the financial system. One can and should
critique this, of course, but nonetheless remain aware
that this is no simple matter of opposing it. This side of
revolutionary emancipation beyond capital, a Marxian
politics would demand to better finance capital no less
than to support labor. Finance capital is no less legiti-
mate if also no less symptomatic of capital than any other
phenomenon of modern life. So it deserves not to be vili-
fied or denounced but understood as a way humanity has
tried authentically to cope with the creative destruction of
capital in modern social life. IP

THE CROWD ASSEMBLED in a shady corner of Grant Park
in the waning afternoon hours of August 28 might have
been mistaken for extras in a poorly-funded period film.
With clothes loosely evoking 60's-era protest, they reclined
in the grass, rolling cigarettes, eating peanut-butter-and-
jelly sandwiches, listening to speeches and gazing at the
sky. It might have seemed a stretch to bill the event as a
historical reenactment of the notorious 1968 Democratic
National Convention protests — that long and bloody
week in Chicago which has been discussed and picked
over at length in this 40 th anniversary year. The emblems
of Chicago '68 — wild-eyed police officers with nightsticks
— were nowhere to be seen. Grant Park on that afternoon
was more concerned with the action around the campfire
than the savagery on the battlefield.

It might seem purely semantic that we insisted on
considering the event a historical reenactment rather than
a commemoration or a bit of theater, but for us this was
an important distinction. As a group of young, largely
inexperienced activists it was the only organizing frame-
work we could find which emphasized active participation.
Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid;
of course we could observe the anniversary, as people had
been doing all summer, but this implied an insufficient (and
appalling] detachment from the subject. We didn't want to
view our history— our radical history— as if from a riverbank,
we wanted to jump in and splash around in it.

The reenactment of the 1 968 Chicago DNC protests
would be a curious project, difficult to plan, the shape of
it abnormal and constantly shifting. Our purpose seemed
perfectly obvious at times, entirely digestible— a historical
reenactment of the '68 DNC protests, that's all— but at other
times it seemed to bulge surrealistically in a thousand direc-
tions. Would we aim for some degree of historical accuracy,
or would anything fly? We debated, for instance, the ethics of
nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed
it, and where would it stay? Which would we feed the masses
of reenactors, potato or pasta salad? And in the event of
trouble with the police, what, among a stunning array of
possible tactics, might prove our wisest course of action?
We plotted and planned over the summer to the point of
exhaustion; the minutiae multiplied endlessly. And yet, when
pressed as to why we were attempting such a thing, we had
no ready answer. It was soundbite-resistant, experimental, it
called for deep breaths and meandering explanations.

Clearly this history had not yet been codified. It contin-
ued to elicit a variety of interpretations. A recent addition to
the collection of books on '68, Frank Kusch's Battleground
Chicago, attempted a cop's-eye view of the week's event;
academics and historians continued to tackle the subject
from disparate angles, trying to come to grips with this jar-
ring moment in modern American history when power and
resistance grappled so publicly and with so much violence
and fanfare. Our subject matter still was squirming, making
it impossible to predict what shape a reenactment might

take. We estimated an attendance of anywhere from 100 to
1 0,000 people— who could say how many Chicagoans knew
or cared enough about the '68 convention to devote a day in
the park to its exploration?— and we applied rather blindly for
a permit from the Park District, treading lightly through their
downtown office as if in an enemy lair; we contemplated a
range of possible police responses, from utter indifference to
full-scale riot. We solicited the advice of everyone from '60s-
era activist-professors like Abe Peck and Bernadine Dohrn
to freakniks like Ed Sanders, though few of these aging lions
had much to offer beyond bemused encouragement.

What few of us predicted, in the midst of our fretting,
was the cool and contemplative afternoon which ultimately
unfolded. A small detail of bike police, having preemptively
barricaded the iconic Logan statue from a possible storm-
ing, relaxed on the far periphery as local authors, filmmak-
ers, activists and historians chewed over the meaning of
the '68 convention's legacy, and performers exhumed the
ghosts of the DNC's radical celebrity class, from Phil Ochs
and the MC5 to Bobby Seale and Allen Ginsberg. I found
myself delivering a surprisingly mild-tempered speech
which called for the metaphorical sharing of blankets. Oc-
casional pot fumes wafted across the crowd, no mere prop,
and by twilight, after several hours of speech-making and
folksinging, the ritual of mass meditation seemed almost
capable of releasing us from the weight of this history.
This release was something of an illusion, of course. The
following week, protesters at the Republican National
Convention in St. Paul were being tear-gassed and arrested
by the hundreds, their homes and gathering places raided
by teams from the Department of Homeland Security. The
historic echoes were inevitable and maddening, the old

■

stalemate so clearly still at work. It was difficult to reconcile
what we'd accomplished — little more or less than a beau-
tiful and thought-provoking afternoon in the park — with
the ugly echoes of '68 emanating from the Twin Cities. If our
reenactment, unpermitted and inherently anti-authoritar-
ian, was a modest exercise in discovering what we could get
away with in the public sphere, news from St. Paul came as
a stern reminder of what we couldn't get away with. A shady
corner of Grant Park on a late-summer evening, they'd give
us that, but to agitate outside of an actual political conven-
tion, with all of those television cameras on hand, would
prove as unfeasible in 2008 as it was 40 years ago. Protest-
ers in St. Paul were being summarily tear-gassed and
jailed en masse, held (unconstitutionally] for the duration
of the convention week to preclude further disruption. It
was sobering to speculate that law enforcement might have
learned more about stifling dissent, over the last 40 years,
than demonstrators had learned about cultivating it.

We were asked several times, in the course of planning
the event, whether it might lead to similar historical reenact-
ments in the future. It was an understandable question to be
asked by journalists, but it misses the point. The last thing
we wanted, though we had a curious way of showing it, was
to lose ourselves in yesterday's near-revolutionary mo-
ments, to fetishize or serialize them for their own sake. We
were more interested in comprehending their shortcomings;
the fact that the '68 convention was followed shortly by the
election of Richard Nixon and a marked increase in political
repression served as a prominent footnote to our idyll in the
park. The clear view of history which we were striving for
would not illuminate, of its own accord, any paths forward. It
might, we hoped, foster meaningful dialogue. IP

Iraq , continued from page 3

History, continued from page 3

has played a strategy in his campaign from which any pur-
ported "Left" must learn politically: that it is not a good
idea to bank ahead of time on the defeat of one's oppo-
nents. Obama's campaign is in more trouble than it might
have been because it has lost its signal issue with which
to prosecute the Republicans with the Bush administra-
tion, a "losing" war in Iraq. Obama can be elected despite
this, and fudge the issue of the war and "opposition" to it
as policy.

But the "Left" remains in a similar but in fact much
worse predicament. The "Left" never asked the burning
question: What if the Bush policy "succeeds?" Then what
will be the basis for opposition to U.S. "imperialism?"

Iraq is nothing like Vietnam, despite the wishes of the
"Left" to have history repeat itself. If Iraq does not , as it
appears it will not, fall apart or drag on in endless slaugh-
ter, but continues to stabilize, and does not give up sov-
ereignty over its oil resources, etc., but simply allows the
U.S. some minimal military presence through its embassy
there, and continues to work with the U.S. against groups
like al-Qaeda, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah, the
Kurdish PKK guerillas in Turkey, and willingly sides with
the U.S., as it will inevitably, in any potential future wars
against Iran or Syria, etc., will this mean that the U.S. in-
vasion and occupation diminished Iraqi "sovereignty" and
so was a phenomenon of U.S. "imperialism?" What will be
the account of Iraqi motives in the arrangement achieved
by U.S. intervention, as mere stooges for the U.S.?

And won't this mean taking a much coarser and nar-
rower-minded view of the actual concrete politics of Iraq
and the Middle East than those evinced by Obama, McCain
and (even) Bush, so effectively disqualifying the "Left" as
being in any way competent to comment, let alone critique
or offer political alternatives?

What will remain the basis for the "Left's" opposition
to U.S. policy in a world McCain or Obama would make
after Bush — after Blackwater, et al. quit the Iraqi scene,
as they already are doing, and not through defeat but
success, and not without some selective high-profile (if
become less interesting] investigations and prosecutions
of "war crimes" by Americans, now that the U.S. can af-
ford them?

How will U.S. power in the world be understood, and
what critique and vision of the future will be posed in the
face of its undiminished capacities? IP

ficity of the modern problem of social freedom, however,
it becomes clear that the Left must define itself not
sociologically, whether in terms of socioeconomic class
or a principle of collectivism over individualism, etc., but
rather as a matter of consciousness, specifically historical
consciousness.

For, starting with Marx, it is consciousness of history
and historical potential and possibilities, however appar-
ently Utopian or obscure, that distinguishes the Left from
the Right, not the struggle against oppression— which the
modern Right also claims. The Right does not represent
the past but rather the foreclosing of possibilities in the
present.

For this reason, it is important for us to recognize the
potential and fact of regression that the possibilities for
the Left in theory and practice have suffered as a result of
the abandonment of historical consciousness in favor of
the immediacies of struggles against oppression.

Marx's critique of symptomatic socialism, from Proud-
hon, Lassalle, Bakunin, et al., to his own followers in the
new German Social-Democratic Party and their program
at Gotha [as well as in Engels's subsequent critique of the
Erfurt Programme), was aimed at maintaining the Marx-
ian vision corresponding to the horizon of possibility of
post-capitalist and post-proletarian society.

Unfortunately, beginning in Marx's own lifetime, the
form of politics he sought to inspire began to fall well
below the threshold of this critically important conscious-
ness of history. And the vast majority of this regression has
taken place precisely in the name of "Marxism." Through-
out the history of Marxism, from the disputes with the
anarchists in the 1st International Workingmen's Associa-
tion, and disputes in the 2nd Socialist International, to the
subsequent splits in the Marxist workers' movement with
the Bolshevik-led Third, Communist International and
Trotskyist Fourth International, a sometimes heroic but, in
retrospect, overwhelmingly tragic struggle to preserve or
recover something of the initial Marxian point of departure
for modern proletarian socialism took place.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, developments re-
gressed so far behind the original Marxian self-conscious-
ness that Marxism itself became an affirmative ideology
of industrial society, and the threshold of post-capitalist
society became obscured, finding expression only obtusely,
in various recrudescent Utopian ideologies, and, finally, in
the most recent period, with the hegemony of "anarchist"
ideologies and Romantic rejections of modernity.

But, beyond this crisis and passage into oblivion of
a specifically Marxian approach, the "Left" itself, which
emerged prior to Hegel and Marx's attempts to philoso-
phize its historical significance, has virtually disappeared.
The present inability to distinguish conservative-reaction-
ary from progressive-emancipatory responses to the prob-
lems of society conditioned by capital, is inseparable from
the decline and disappearance of the social movement of
proletarian socialism for which Marx had sought to pro-
vide a more adequate and provocative self-consciousness

at the time of its emergence in the 19th Century.

Paradoxically, as Lukacs, following Luxemburg and
Lenin, already pointed out, almost a century ago, while
the apparent possibility of overcoming capital approaches
in certain respects, in another sense it seems to retreat
infinitely beyond the horizon of possibility. Can we follow
Luxemburg's early recognition of the opportunism that
always threatens us, not as some kind of selling-out or
falling from grace, but rather the manifestation of the
very real fear that attends the dawning awareness of what
grave risks are entailed in trying to fundamentally move
the world beyond capital?

What's worse— and, in the present, prior to any danger
of "opportunism"— with the extreme coarsening if not ut-
ter disintegration of the ability to apprehend and trans-
form capital through working-class politics, has come the
coarsening of our ability to even recognize and apprehend,
let alone adequately understand our social reality. We
do not suffer simply from opportunism but from a rather
more basic disorientation. Today we are faced with the
problem not of changing the world but more fundamen-
tally of understanding it.

On the other hand, approach Marxian socialism, are we
dealing with a "utopia?"— And, if so, what of this? What is
the significance of our "utopian" sense of human potential
beyond capital and proletarian labor? Is it a mere dream?

Marx began with Utopian socialism and ended with the
most influential if spectacularly failing modern political
ideology, "scientific socialism." At the same time, Marx
gave us an acute and incisive critical framework for grasp-
ing the reasons why the last 200 years have been, by far,
the most tumultuously transformative but also destructive
epoch of human civilization, why this period has promised
so much and yet disappointed so bitterly. The last 200
years have seen more, and more profound changes, than
prior millennia have. Marx attempted to grasp the reasons
for this. Others have failed to see the difference and
have tried to re-assimilate modern history back into its
antecedents (for instance, in postmodernist illusions of an
endless medievalism: see Bruno Latour's 1993 book We
have never been modern].

What would it mean to treat the entire Marxian project
as, first and foremost, a recognition of the history of
modernity fouf court as one of the pathology of transition,
from the class society that emerged with the agricultural
revolution 10,000 years ago and the civilizations based on
an essentially peasant way of life, through the emergence
of the commodity form of social mediation, to the present
global civilization dominated by capital, towards a form of
humanity that might lie beyond this?

With Marx we are faced with a self-consciousness of
an obscure and mysterious historical task, which can only
be further clarified theoretically through transformative
practice— the practice of proletarian socialism. But this
task has been abandoned in favor of what are essentially
capital-reconsf/tuf/ng struggles, attempting to cope with
the vicissitudes of the dynamics of modern history. But

this re-assimilation of Marxism back into ideology char-
acteristic of the revolt of the Third Estate means the loss
of the true horizon of possibility that motivated Marx and
gave his project meaning and urgency.

Can we follow Marx and the best historically revo-
lutionary Marxists who followed him in recognizing the
forms of discontent in the pathological society we inhabit
as being themselves symptomatic of and bound up with
the very problem against which they rage? Can we avoid
the premature post-capitalism and bad, reactionary
utopianism that attends the present death of the Left in
theory in practice, and preserve and fulfill the tasks given
to us by history? Can we recognize the breadth and depth
of the problem we seek to overcome without retreating
into wishful thinking and ideological gracing of the ac-
complished fact, and apologizing for impulses that only
seem directed against it, at the expense of what might lie
beyond the traps of the suffering of the present?

We urgently need an acute awareness of our histori-
cal epoch as well as of our fleeting moment now, within
it.— We must ask what it is about the present moment
that might make the possibility of recovering a Marxian
social and political consciousness viable, and how we can
advance it by way of recovering it.

For the pathology of our modern society mediated
by capital, of the proletarian form of social life and its
self-objectifications, the new forms of humanity it makes
possible, which are completely unprecedented in history,
grows only worse the longer delayed is taking the possible
and necessary steps to the next levels of the struggle for
freedom.

The pathology grows worse, not merely in terms of
the various forms of the destruction of humanity, which
are daunting, but also, perhaps more importantly— and
disturbingly— in the manifest worsening social conditions
and capacities for practical politics on the Left, and our
worsening theoretical awareness of them. If there has been
a crisis and evacuation of Marxian thought, it has been be-
cause its most fundamental context and point of departure,
its awareness of its greater historical moment, the possibil-
ity of an epochal transition, has been forgotten, while we
have not ceased to share this moment, but only lost sight
of its necessities and possibilities. Any future emancipa-
tory politics must regain such awareness of the transitional
nature of capitalist modernity and of the reasons why we
pay such a steep price for failing to recognize this. IP